First Prototype

Party Barrels has it's first playable version, having moved on from just a design concept we now have our very first playable prototype. This first version has no way for the player to die (Lindsay Mode), and mostly serves to get a feel for how the game will actually play. Given that UI work is usually fairly tedious, I figured I may as well get a head start.

The main menu is a broad template, but only the settings and player selection are currently (mostly) functional. Each game mode has been defined and requires a minimum and maximum number of players before the final Start Game button becomes active, though for now it only loads the Game scene, and does not spawn in any additional players. 

For the settings, a scriptable object called GameSettings has been defined. This object has fields for each of the individual settings, storing sliders as floats and checkboxes as simple booleans. All UI elements have dynamic callbacks that can then update those SO values when the UI elements get changed. These settings can then be read from anywhere in the game, most importantly AudioSources will update themselves with the respective values when a scene is loaded or when the in-game settings screen gets changed, though these have not yet been implemented in the Game scene.

 The player movement is currently done using simple wasd polling, while continually being moved towards the camera based on the game's scroll speed. The player "hops" by lerping from the starting point to the destination point (as determined by the input key), as well as by evaluating a height curve that moves the player up and down based on the lerp progression. There is some more maths involved to move the player across the water terrain slices when they're standing on a log, but ultimately each log has a collider that extends upwards, and as soon as a player enters it, the player gets moved horizontally with the log. 

The terrain movement is also partially implemented, but we worked out that not all terrain tiles will lend themselves to just moving all containing objects. There may be terrain slices that instead of moving obstacles, have a fast-paced threat that needs to be triggered (such as a fast train zooming past in crossy road). First attemts at moving the terrain have been made, but it's clear that it's not as simple as just moving the individual objects, and more complex controls will be required.

The world is built by spawning in a pre-defined number of grass slices to provide a safe starting area. Each slice is scrolled based on the scrollspeed in the settinngs, and will be destroyed if they go off-screen. At the same time, a new slice is spawned from a terrain-slices prefab list, which at this point contains a grass slice and two water slices - one moving logs left to right, and the other moving logs right to left. The log spawner on each slice generates a random speed at which those logs will flow.

The current models used are a log model from Kenney.nl, as well as a can of beans made by George, which acts as the current player model. In the end players will be able to choose which barrel skin to use, and for now the grass and water tiles are just plain unity cubes with different coloured materials assigned to them.